Australian Police Arrest Alleged LulzSec Hacker

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) recently announced the arrest of a 24-year-old member of LulzSec (h/t E Hacking News).

In a statement, the police said the arrest was in response to a defacement of a government Web site earlier this month, and noted, "The man is a self-proclaimed leader of the group ‘Lulz Security’ (Lulzsec), a computer hacking group that has existed since 2011."

"He is a well-respected person within the Anonymous community, within LulzSec and that side of the house, but he has also worked in the IT professional field," Brad Marden, co-ordinator for cyber crime operations at the AFP, told The Sydney Morning News.

The Australian reports that the hacker, known online as Aush0k, is Matthew Flannery, an employee of IT security company Tenable Network Security -- though the company responded to the report by stating, "Matthew Flannery does not and has never been an employee of Tenable."

On his LinkedIn profile, Flannery claims to have been a security engineer at Tenable since February 2013, and states, "My main professional interests lie in Network/System Security, Computer Forensics, Networking (Physical, VLAN, R&S etc), Protocol Architectures, Communication Systems, System Management / Administration and Penetration Testing."

According to the AFP, Flannery has been released on bail and will next appear in court on May 15, 2013. He's been charged with two counts of unauthorized modification of data to cause impairment, and one count of unauthorized access to, or modification of, restricted data.